Politics is the art of the possible.

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.